What’s sexier than a bad boy? A bad ass man who’s got his shit together.
Max Alexander is nearing thirty-five. He’s built a successful company, and he’s conquered the professional world, but he’s never been lucky in love. Focusing so much time on his business and raising his daughter, adulting has come at the expense of his personal life.
His social skills are shit, his patience is shot, and at times, his temper runs hot.
The last thing he has time for is the recently single, too gorgeous for her own good young woman he hires to take care of his little girl. She’s a distraction he doesn’t need, and besides, there’s no way she’d be interested. But you know what they say about assumptions?

This review is clearly going to go against the grain.

A gruff single-dad, a hot nanny and a cute dream of a little girl? It’s mostly likely guaranteed to make many female readers’ ovaries explode (!), but right now, I like mine where they are: safe, tucked away and unmoved by this apparently domestic scene. It’s not so much as that it’s a version of the manwhore/casual player vs the virgin (or at least, the very experienced man vs. the woman who is fairly inexperienced) that chafed my backside because it is, but rather how suddenly a male protagonist can conveniently fall for a woman and suddenly realise he can commit when he’d never given others a chance to do so, while spending most of the book having 3 women sort of tussling over him in a silent territory war.

The truth is, I found it extremely difficult to like the characters at all straight from the start, though Addison’s insecurity about barely being able to ‘please’ her own ex might have played into it as well. A single-father by accident, Max had never expected that his neat, I’m-the-centre-of-my-own-universe to tilt on its axis, first by a baby, then by the nanny that he employs. And that’s pretty much the story, as both Max and Addison negotiate the bends of their relationship (complete with the dumb-struck, hit-by-lust-moment when they meet) both professionally and personally.

Not only was it hard to accept that Max had difficulty committing to any woman—not least his ex, whom I thought he wronged so badly—and then suddenly wanting to do do with the nanny when she turned out to be the beautiful, nurturing type that attracted him immediately just smacked of hypocrisy to me. It was only because I think, that he’d never stuck around long enough to do so with any other woman, and that this only happened because they were stuck in close quarters for an extended amount of time. I also couldn’t get past the fact that all he really wanted was to scratch the itch he felt while keeping things casual, yet not being interested in fixing what was broken with his ex.

I didn’t have anything against Addison, but this premise alone—of Max just going on with life and leaving everything else in the dust, as he did with many other women—made the entire book difficult to finish. But that Addison herself was insecure about her own femininity made her an easy ‘target’ to fall prey to Max’s propositions to get into another fling. When he finally gotten her where he wanted her, Addison was suddenly the ‘tighest’, best woman he’d ever been with, the woman he couldn’t remember wanting more, the woman with whom it felt ‘so right’.

Unfortunately, ’The House Mate’ is definitely not the book for me, especially not when everything rubbed me the wrong way and raised every heckle I have. In fact, the vehement reaction I had to this particular book surprised even myself, despite my wanting to give it a fair chance.